Q When you were going through the casting process for this, did you get a lot of questions from actors, especially when it came to what tone you had in mind for this show?

A I don’t think I ever had that conversation with the actors. I’m really proud of the writers’ room, and I’m really proud of the cast. I think they’re extraordinary. They all have the facility for giving a very real performance, which sometimes allows for comedy, as well.

Matthew Macfadyen: The star of TV’s new family saga Succession finds his dark sideA drama about a dysfunctional American dynasty has allowed the actor to ditch the charm — and he’s loving every minute of it

Spoiler:

Larushka Ivan-ZadehJuly 28 2018, 12:01am, The Times

Matthew MacFadyen: “Acting is an odd job. I can switch it on and off, I don’t get myself into a state over it”

JOSH WOOL

Squabbling New York squillionaires populate Succession, a new, satirical family saga created for HBO by Jesse Armstrong, the co-writer of political hits The Thick of It and Veep.

The show’s big daddy is Logan Roy (Brian Cox), a “pal to prime ministers, a truth-teller to presidents” of Scottish descent and the ruthless octogenarian head of Waystar-Royco, a self-made family global media and entertainment conglomerate. As Logan’s health falters along with his company’s fortunes, his power-hungry children compete, fang and claw, to succeed him.

In early episodes the pretender Kendall Roy (Jeremy Strong) tosses billions at a “portfolio of online brands and digital content” that his dad dismisses as “a gay little website”.

Matthew Macfadyen and Hayley Atwell in Howards EndLAURIE SPARHAM

Matthew Macfadyen, the star of Ripper Street and the recent BBC adaptation of Howards End, plays the absurdly named Tom Wamsgans, Logan’s idiot soon-to-be son-in-law. He is well aware of the obvious parallels with today’s business barons. “There are the Redstones, the Mercers, as well as the Trumps; many of those big corporations are owned by families, so there is a lot to reference.”

America’s first family were firmly in the cast and creative teams’ minds when the show started filming. “We had the read-through for the pilot in New York on the morning of the election,” says Macfadyen.

Afterwards the cast holed up at the house of the executive producer Adam McKay to watch with increasing horror as the results unfolded. Trump’s win was “terrible for humanity”, but it was “great for the show”, judges Macfadyen, “because anything that might have seemed over the top about it suddenly isn’t.”

Whoever they may or may not thinly resemble in real life, the Roys are total monsters on screen, which Macfadyen found “delicious fun” to play, because he is just about the nicest actor ever invented. On first encounter his unfailingly eager politeness, thick eyelashes and endearingly tufty brown hair combine to remind one of Paddington Bear.

“There is something very therapeutic about being really nasty. It was such fun,” he says jovially over a cup of tea in his PR’s central London office. “Such fun” being his delighted response to most things — said without any edge of Joyce Grenfell desperation. And what was “most fun” of all about Succession was playing “the bullying element” of Tom, Waystar-Royco’s inexperienced head of parks. “He’s this terrible puppyish sycophant with Logan, then he turns and exacts this real cruelty on Greg, the Roys’ young cousin, who he perceives as a threat.”

Matthew Macfadyen’s co-stars in the HBO series Succession

Tom is not a nice guy. Or is he? Just a little bit? He’s certainly Succession’s most fascinating character and secret weapon. You are agog to see how he’ll behave.

While willing to eating a canteen’s worth of shit sandwiches to climb the greasy corporate pole to the Roy inner circle, Tom seems genuinely sweet on his fiancée, Logan’s favoured only daughter, Siobhan (Sarah Snook), a politico power blonde whom the family aptly nickname “Shiv”. Yet his sadistic tormenting/kindly mentoring of the gormless Greg (Nicholas Braun) borders on the sexual.

“Would you kiss me if I asked you to?” Tom asks Greg. “If I told you to?” he persists. He pauses. Expressionless. “I’m joking!” Or is he? As Tom puts it: “I may look really funny, but I’m a terrible, terrible prick.” Pause. “Got you again!”

For the 43-year-old Macfadyen, Succession was “a dream” for several reasons, most obviously because it proffered today’s golden prize of a long-form US TV series located on the east coast, so he could get back for weekends with his children — he has two (aged 11 and 13) plus an 18-year-old stepson with his actress wife, Keeley Hawes. He has also never played an American on screen, so that presented an “exciting” challenge.

Macfadyen with Keira Knightley in the 2005 film adaptation of Pride and PrejudiceALEX BAILEY/WORKING TITLE/REX/SHUTTERSTOCK

Biggest tick, however, was that after two decades playing inherently kind, yet emotionally wounded middle-class Englishmen in every big British TV period drama, from Wuthering Heights and Little Dorrit to last year’s Howards End, not to mention that ultimate repressed romantic Mr Darcy in the 2005 film of Pride and Prejudice, “it was so nice not having to put on a tweed waistcoat or britches to play Mr Nice, Esq”.

His only worry with Succession was that the characters were so “revoltingly venal” and fabulously horrible that you wouldn’t care about them. You can see his point. Witness episode one, which is directed by Adam McKay, the Oscar-winning writer and director of The Big Short, a film that highlighted the casual devastation wrought by America’s 0.01 per cent. In the episode Roman Roy (Kieran Culkin) co-opts the young Latino son of a member of the Roy ground staff into Logan’s birthday game of softball. He promises the boy $1 million if he hits a home run.

When the boy fails, after Tom gleefully taps him out, Roman tears up a $1 million cheque in the lad’s crestfallen face. Logan clumsily attempts comfort by shaking the boy’s hand and muttering “magnificent effort” — greater praise than he musters for his own cocky offspring, whom he frequently goads to tears. A Roy fixer then sweeps in with a non-disclosure agreement for the boy and his parents to sign, sealing the deal with a Patek Philippe watch.

Yet for Macfadyen, even within such toxic intergenerational moments you can unearth the show’s humanity. To him Succession is fundamentally a “weird, sad, hilarious and beautifully put together” family drama, far more than it is a media satire, albeit a largely preposterous one about ridiculously rich folk, showered with The Thick of It levels of profanity. “There are some really hilarious slapstick moments, but also some very serious heartbreaking ones.”

Matthew Macfadyen and his wife, the actress Keeley Hawes, who met working on SpooksTIM P WHITBY/GETTY IMAGES

What he found most touching was “the lack of confidence that the kids have. They are sort of hamstrung by their father, who probably does love them and doesn’t want them to suffer in the way he perhaps suffered in childhood, so he has given them everything and is doing everything for them.”

Cox, he recalls, would talk a lot about the parallels he identified with King Lear. Of Logan as the patriarch holding on to power and the confusion of who loves who and how to show love. “Logan is unwilling or unable to let go of the company and allow his children to be their own people. As a result they’re sort of cossetted and needy and unable to make decisions, and he finds he doesn’t really like them very much.”

Mercifully, Macfadyen’s own upbringing was, according to his reports, far more functional. His father was an oil executive, which, since we’re talking American corporate dynasties, sounds rather Dallas. “It was!” he agrees, “but the Dallas of the Far East.” When Matthew was ten the Macfadyens relocated from Norfolk to Indonesia, where they lived in an area of Jakarta surrounded by Texans. “I remember these big guys with belt buckles and perms and lots of ciggies and Scotch.”

It was a peripatetic childhood, as the family moved to accompany his father’s work, but Macfadyen loved it. “I think if you are happy then your mum and dad are happy, and the family felt very secure. So it was just a big exciting adventure, really.”

Being sent to boarding school was, he admits “sort of strange”, but he just got on with it. A slightly shy child, he recalls trying to summon up the courage to audition for school plays. Even then his inherent boyish non-evilness resulted in typecasting. “I got cast as a murderer in Macbeth in my second year, but my voice hadn’t broken, so I was demoted to one of Macduff’s children. I found that quite hard to take.” Although he presumably just got on with that too.

Macfadyen in SpooksBBC

Indeed for an actor, Macfadyen seems outrageously well-adjusted. “It’s an odd job and I worry and wonder if I’m doing the right thing, but I don’t walk around with a part consuming me. I can turn it off and on and I don’t need to get myself in a state.”

Certainly, there was no question of his father forcing him into the oil business. It wasn’t an option because Matthew didn’t pass his maths GCSE, despite three “awful” attempts. “So I was never going to do anything remotely clever,” he beams with classic middle-class deprecation. “Though I was really horrible to my teenage stepson when he got a C — I sort of took out all my fury on him.” I refuse to picture it.

He and Keeley are, of course, both in the biz — they met while shooting Spooks — but have no designs to mould an acting dynasty. He is burstingly proud of his 13-year-old daughter Maggie. “She was completely brilliant as Tallulah in Bugsy Malone, but as soon as I go, ‘So, are you going to audition for the next school play?’ she’s, like, ‘Please, no.’ ” Their 11-year-old son, he says, is more interested in football.

Macfadyen, one senses, may be just a teeny bit disappointed by this, but he’s not going to bring down the iron fist. “It’s interesting as a parent that you have to do your same thing without imposing your own nonsense or your own vanity about ‘you’ve got to do this’ on to them.” He pauses. “Just make sure they know that you love them.” Logan Roy may rule Succession’s throne, but in real life Macfadyen is the daddy.